If so, I'd like to read an account of their thinking and the kinds of forced 'adaptations' they have in mind. The hive mind is one of the stupidest and deadliest memes pursued by transhumanists and could only be thought to be a good idea by people whose educations have left them with no appreciation of the variety of human ideas proliferated in human cultural history -- and our absolute need for all those perspectives. Fortunately not all individuals involved in CT and AI are so intellectually limited. The hive mind is not even an issue in the best-informed discussion I've come across concerning 'ThX', linked below from Edge. It begins with a 'half-manifesto' by Jaron Lanier {the second half might have been published by now and if so I want to read it} and continues with responses from a variety of experts and thinkers on the major issues raised in the CT and AI fields. Here's the link to this long and very rewarding discussion:
ONE HALF A MANIFESTO | Edge.org
Right, as you say those who aren't protesting are rapidly -- and uncritically -- adapting to the transhumanist/posthumanist meme. The uncritical believers in ThX seem not to have read Huxley's
Brave New World and other classic dystopian novels forecasting the kind of future Kurzweil and a few others Messianic types are attempting to bring about. At the level of mass consumer society, the adaptation to transhumanist memes goes on at a superficial level, buying into ideas of 'self-enhancement' with no glimmer of recognition that the goal of ThX is to dispense with individual selves and the messy market-place of ideas they generate, which has always been our species' saving grace.
The long discussion of Lanier's paper at the Edge link is refreshing because it demonstrates the variety of well-informed critical thinking needed to cope with what's happening in CT/AI/ThX. But very few people will read it, tucked away as it is in an intelligent corner of the internet. And these critical thinkers make no mistake about the present character of the civilization we live in, in which, as Thoreau presciently expressed it, "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind."
From the opening of Lanier's Semifesto ... a very good point about one thing leading to another:
"During the last twenty years a stream of books has gradually informed the larger public about the belief structure of the inner circle of Digerati, starting softly, for instance with Godel, Escher, Bach, and growing more harsh with recent entries such as The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurtzweil.
Recently, public attention has finally been drawn to #6, the astonishing belief in an eschatological cataclysm in our lifetimes, brought about when computers become the ultra-intelligent masters of physical matter and life. So far as I can tell, a large number of my friends and colleagues believe in some version of this immanent doom.
I am quite curious who, among the eminent thinkers who largely accept some version of the first five points, are also comfortable with the sixth idea, the eschatology. In general, I find that technologists, rather than natural scientists, have tended to be vocal about the possibility of a near-term criticality.
**I have no idea, however, what figures like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett make of it. Somehow I can't imagine these elegant theorists speculating about whether nanorobots might take over the planet in twenty years. It seems beneath their dignity.
And yet, the eschatologies of Kurtzweil, Moravec, and Drexler follow
directly and, it would seem, inevitably,
from an understanding of the world that has been most sharply articulated by none other than Dawkins and Dennett.
Do Dawkins, Dennett, and others in their camp see some flaw in logic that insulates their thinking from the eschatological implications? The primary candidate for such a flaw as I see it is that cyber-armageddonists have confused ideal computers with real computers, which behave differently. My position on this point can be evaluated separately from my admittedly provocative positions on the first five points, and I hope it will be."
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